Jeneen Frei Njootli

Co-produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, this extensive exhibition brings together the work of three Canadian artists—Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kathy Slade—at the Kunsteverein’s historic Villa Salve Hospes.

Curated by Franz Hempel, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Julia Lamare


### Biographies
Nadia Belerique received her MFA from the University of Guelph. Recent solo exhibitions include *There’s A Hole In The Bucket, Daniel Faria Gallery* (2019); *On Sleep Stones*, Grazer Kunstverein (2018) and *The Weather Channel*, Oakville Galleries (2018). Her work has been included in La Biennale de Montreal (2016) curated by Philippe Pirote and the Gwangju Biennale (2016), curated by Maria Lind. It has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Tensta Konsthall, Spånga; Kunsthalle, Wein; Vie d’ange, Montreal; The Power Plant, Toronto; and Downs and Ross, New York. Belerique was long-listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award and has completed residencies at Walk & Talk, The Azores and Fogo Island Arts, among others. Forthcoming exhibitions include: Kunstverein Braunschweig (2020), Toronto Biennial (2021) and Fogo Island Arts (2022). She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a 2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin artist whose award-winning practice takes the forms of performance, sound, textiles, images, collaboration, workshops, and feral scholarship. Having exhibited and performed internationally, they are now living in the ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples while teaching at the University of British Columbia. Concerned with Indigenous politics and aesthetics, Frei Njootli is currently welding, sewing, writing, and organizing. If you are interested in learning more about Jeneen’s work, please check out *my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money*, available through the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver bookstore.

Kathy Slade is an artist, writer, curator, and editor/publisher. She works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade’s work draws upon sources ranging from cult films and punk rock music to literary classics, art history, feminism, technology, and labour histories. Her recent solo exhibitions include: *A Dream and a Drive* (in collaboration with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2019); *This is a Chord. This is Another.*, Surrey Art Gallery (2018) and *Blue Monday*, 4COSE, London (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: *Protest and Design*, Dublin Art Book Fair (2020); Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2020); *It’s Never Too Late to Speculate*, Fluc, Vienna (2019); and *Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT*, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver (2018). Slade curated *Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press* at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver (2019) and was Curator of the 2019 Vancouver Art Book Fair.



ExhibitionGuide_Belerique-Frei-Njootli-Slade_KunstvereinBraunschweig_2021.pdf

Two woven tapestries hang on two walls of a gallery. Both tapestries depict imagery of hands holding a book with their fingers prominently touching a page of or inserted in the book.

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A close view of stacked white, plastic barrels. Some barrels are empty while others contain coloired liquid objects or are sealed with colourful stained glass lids.

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A brown hoodie with bold, black text hangs on a gallery wall so that the back is visible. Blue hair emerges from the hood and black fringe hangs down from each sleeve.

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A close view of beads black, red, white, and gold beads filling the cracks of cobblestone pavement. Part of a white building is blurred in the background.

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A small gallery room with three monitors on three walls. On the centre back wall, the monitor plays a video of a talking head. On the parallel walls, two monitors with blue screens face each other.

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Several artworks are installed in a gallery space. Three white plastic barrel sculptures are placed on the wood tile floor. Two wood-framed photographs of a doorknob are mounted on the white wall

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In a darkened gallery space, a single-channel video work is projected on a white wall at the end of the room. The video shows a pair of hands holding a beaded rope.

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Books and blankets are displayed on a wood table in the centre of a room. Two large textile works depicting images of a hand in a book and a reclining person are mounted on the wall behind the table. 

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Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in Summer 2018, the solo exhibition and accompanying publication of Vuntut Gwitchin artist Jeneen Frei Njootli is now hosted by our touring partner, the Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario.

### Biography
Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited her work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways, and the bush. She works across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and is a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2017). In 2016 she was one of three recipients of the William & Meredith Saunderson ,from the  Hnatyshyn Foundation. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017 and in 2018, she was shortlisted for the same. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Fierman Gallery, NYC; Artspace, Peterborough; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; and Definitely Superior Art Gallery, Thunder Bay. She has participated in the 2018 Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) / Contemporary Native Art Biennial, and in group exhibitions at Western Front, Vancouver; ONE AND J + 1, Seoul; Mercer Union, Toronto; Available Light Film Festival, Whitehorse; LandMarks2017/ Repères2017, PAVED Arts, Saskatoon; Whitewater Gallery, North Bay, ON; Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba, Brandon; Vancouver Art Gallery, Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Yukon Arts Centre, Gallery 44, Toronto; and many others. Her work has been part of Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto (2018) and Vancouver (2017) as well as at the Adäka Cultural Festival in Whitehorse (2015). Frei Njootli has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and, has collaborated with James Luna, Olivia Whetung, Tsēma Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart with Laura Ortman, Lyndsay Lachance, Dana Claxton, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill and Chandra Melting Tallow. Her work is in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Jeneen Frei Njootli is currently a grateful, uninvited guest on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish territories.



A close up view of a steel sheet marked with two hand prints pointing downwards and made of grease. The steel is covered with other faint markings and appears to be gray, blue and purple.

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my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money

Join us to celebrate the launch of Jeneen Frei Njootli’s first monographic publication, which features commissioned texts by renowned Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle, Vuntut Gwitchin spoken word poet Nagoohiindaak / Melissa Frost and celebrated Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. This book was produced in tandem with Frei Njootli’s recent solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery.

At this event, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language and culture advocate Salia Joseph will share a welcome, and Nagoohiindaak / Melissa Frost will perform the hauntingly beautiful *Ehdii*, her contribution to the book, along with other recent spoken word poems. Frei Njootli and Frost will share a caribou stew they have made together, and bannock will be provided by the Aboriginal Friendship Centre.

The first 40 copies of the publication will include a special limited-edition artist intervention. 

This publication has been made possible through the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, Art Gallery of Burlington, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art and Nada Vuksic.

### Biographies 

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who works across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and is a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2017). In 2016 she was one of three recipients of the William & Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation. She is shortlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award. Frei Njootli’s work has been the focus of numerous solo exhibitions at Fierman Gallery (NYC), Artspace (Peterborough), and Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2018 Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) / Contemporary Native Art Biennial 2018 Contemporary Indigenous Art Biennial, and has collaborated with James Luna, Olivia Whetung, Tsēma Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart with Laura Ortman, Lindsay Lachance, Dana Claxton, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill and Chandra Melting Tallow. She is currently a grateful, uninvited guest on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Skwxwu7mesh territories.

Nagoohiindaak / Melissa Frost is the daughter of Shirlee Frost, granddaughter of Alice Frost, and great-granddaughter of Joanne Njootli. She comes from Wolf clan/Chʼichyàa from the Vuntut Gwichin First Nation of Old Crow, Yukon. Frost is an aunty and a cousin who works for mother earth and our future generations. She has forged a career out of her passion for the arts and community work with youth. Frost tries to channel traditional teachings and positive, hopeful messages when writing or performing her spoken word poetry.

Salia Joseph is from the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Snuneymuxw First Nations on her father’s side and is British and Jewish on her mothers. In 2016 she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in First Nations and Indigenous studies from the University of British Columbia. Joseph recently completed a year long, full time immersion Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim language program at Simon Fraser University. Joseph is proud about where she comes from as a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh woman and is dedicated to learning from and contributing to her community.

An open page from Jeneen Frei Njootli's monograph, titled "my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money." The installation image of the same-named exhibition, where the artist placed large sheets of steel in the gallery, is printed on the page. 

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Jeneen Frei Njootli: my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money

Publication Launch

Join CAG CMA-RBC Indigenous Curatorial Assistant Emily Dundas Oke to explore prominent themes in Jeneen Frei Njootli’s exhibition, *my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money* in relation to the written work of contemporary Indigenous writers found in the exhibition’s accompanying library.

Participants of the reading group are invited to read *Embodied Resurgent Practice and Coded Disruption*, the eleventh chapter of Leanne Betasamoke Simpson’s 2017 book *As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance*, and come to discuss salient themes in connection to Frei Njootli’s current exhibition. Questions surrounding resurgence, generative refusal, embodied practice and decolonial praxis will be explored throughout the evening.

The accompanying library has been created by CAG and Jeneen Frei Njootli in partnership with Simon Fraser University Library.

### Biography

Emily Dundas Oke is an emerging curator and artist. Her work addresses complicated relationships to land as they are embodied within the performative work of contemporary Indigenous artists. A 2018 graduate of Thompson Rivers University (TRU), she has been awarded the Ken Lepin Prize of Excellence for her deep involvement and dedication to research, leadership, the university, and broader communities. She is an alumni of the TRU Indigenous Knowledge Makers program, where she developed research relating the body as a site of knowing within performative works. She is a grateful Cree, Metis, Scottish, and English visitor on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

A photograph of white bookshelves attached to a wall. Multiple books are installed on these bookshelves. 

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Emily Dundas Oke

Reading Group

Join us as four artists reflect together on the many shared concerns of their practices, with the discussion moderated by CAG Curator Kimberly Phillips and Vancouver Art Gallery’s Senior Curatorial Fellow of Indigenous Art, Tarah Hogue.

A collaboration between the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery, this event seeks to register and draw out issues of hospitality, presence and the politics of refusal on the occasion of these artists’ concurrent and upcoming exhibitions in Vancouver.

### Biographies 

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited her work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways and the bush. She works across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and is a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2017). In 2016 she was one of three recipients of the William & Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017 and shortlisted for the same in 2018. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions across Canada and in New York. She has participated in the 2018 Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) / Contemporary Native Art Biennial, and in group exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Seoul, Whitehorse, North Bay, Brandon, Saskatoon, and elsewhere. Frei Njootli has collaborated in performances with James Luna, Olivia Whetung, Tsēma igharas, Krista Belle Stewart with Laura Ortman, Lyndsay Lachance, and Dana Claxton. She is currently a grateful, uninvited guest on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish territories.

Olivia Whetung is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University in 2013, and her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2016. Whetung works in various media including beadwork, printmaking and digital media. Her work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake.

Ayumi Goto is a performance apprentice currently based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Anishnawbe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and Mississaugas of the Credit River. Born in Canada, she draws upon her Japanese heritage and language to unsettle sedimented notions of nation-building, cultural belonging and political compulsions in her creative work. She has served as the art facilitator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver, traditional Coast Salish territory. She enjoys performing in collaboration with artists, scholars and communities writ large to explore creatively and critically reconciliation discourses and relational ethics. Most recently, she has performed public interventions in Berlin, London and Kyoto, as well as focusing on developing human-nonhuman interconnections through performances in rural and forested areas. Ayumi is currently completing her PhD in Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University. In her thesis, she explores a performatively premised conceptualization of “collective responsibility” and relationality as expressed in the practices of Cree Métis artist, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Siksika artist, Adrian Stimson and Tahltan performance artist, Peter Morin.

Peter Morin is a performance artist, curator and writer from the Tahltan Nation.  In his artistic practice, along with his curatorial work, Morin investigates the impact sites that occur when Indigenous cultural-based practices and western settler colonialism collide. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award for Mid-Career Artist.  Morin has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including *Team Diversity Bannock, the World’s Largest Bannock attempt* (2005); *12 Making Objects AKA First Nations DADA (12 Indigenous Interventions)* (2009); *Peter Morin’s Museum* (2011); and Peter Morin’s *Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8 Circle* (2013). In addition to his art making and performance practice, Morin has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery, and Yukon Art Centre. Morin joined the Visual and Aboriginal Arts Faculty at Brandon University in 2014. 


A detail image of Jeneen Frei Njootli's installation work. It is a large-scale sheet of steel with some oil marks that look like a geographic map.

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Jeneen Frei Njootli, Ayumi Goto, Peter Morin, and Olivia Whetung: Resonant Presence and Refusals

Talk

Jeneen Frei Njootli’s solo exhibition in the B.C. Binning Gallery, *my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money*, speaks to refusals, belongings, loss and love, through a new and deeply personal body of work. Its propellant is a series of cultural belongings which are not, in fact, on view: hand-sewn beadwork gifted to Frei Njootli by the women of her family. On first entering the gallery, visitors encounter four large-scale sheets of steel leaning against the walls and floor. Upon their surfaces we catch fugitive impressions left by the beads, which have been pressed into the artist’s skin and then transferred, by way of grease prints, from her skin to the steel. As they inhabit the gallery’s atmosphere over time, the steel plates gradually respond to their environment and, depending upon humidity and temperature fluctuations, the spectral floral patterns might approach the viewer or recede from view, as though of their own volition.

A member of the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin Nation, Frei Njootli’s practice is both invested in and materially tethered to that community, its way of life and the beings that support it. Her relationship to the matter with which she works is not abstract but defined by her lived experience in the far North. Moving between media, she considers the nature of her culture’s belongings (she rejects the term “artifacts”) as they are entangled with ancestral memory, contemporary community and care. She navigates their complex relationships to her own impermanent body and to the continued consumption of Indigenous people’s histories, labour and knowledge. In her actions and interventions, she asks repeatedly of herself and her audiences: Who or what is the sender? Who or what receives?

Fundamental to each of Frei Njootli’s works is a reconfiguration of that which is “given to be seen.” Settler colonialism is intimately linked to patriarchy and capital and thus has always been — and continues to be — a systemically gendered process. It is, as Leey’qsun Coast Salish scholar Rachel Flowers argues, “invested in gaining access to land and resources through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, violently or legislatively, a process that begins with the body, specifically the bodies of Indigenous women.” In our current political moment in Canada, even with its audible shift toward recognition and reconciliation, colonial violence has not ended, and the burden on Indigenous women (art workers, mothers, Elders) to continually give of themselves, their culture and their forgiveness persists. For many Indigenous artists and activists, refusal has become a political practice, and for Frei Njootli, it defines the shape of her feminist-iterated survivance. By setting limits on what can be viewed and consumed, she simultaneously negates access to information and affirms her own sovereignty.

The imperative of capitalist consumption is to work toward smooth and glossy surfaces that conceal signs of labour. Frei Njootli’s grease-printed marks are of the type normally eschewed by the gallery — fingerprints should not be visible on artworks. By insisting on their presence, Frei Njootli not only honours the legions of women who hold Gwich’in culture — first of all her grandmother, who beaded the prickly northern wild rose imagery that appears in this work — but begs a consideration of all the unknown labourers who have handled this steel: who smelted the iron ore? Through whose hands did it travel? Through whose traditional territory?

At the back of the gallery is a new video work commissioned by CAG for this exhibition. A single take, played forward and then in reverse in an endless, seamless loop, records the slow appearance of an expansive panel of floral beadwork impressed upon the artist’s bare back. Projected at a scale echoing that of the steel sheets, Frei Njootli’s skin — which exceeds the boundary of the image — becomes an expansive, slowly undulating field. Almost imperceptibly, the patterned impressions emerge, as though produced by the skin itself.

Skin is a boundary-object: the site of both exposure and connectedness. The complex, living landscape of Frei Njootli’s recorded skin, not unlike the caribou-crossed terrain imaged in Frei Njootli’s 2017 video work *Being Skidoo* or the fugitive grease prints on the steel works, reminds us that the experience of being embodied is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies. Frei Njootli’s marks are indices of interconnectedness and interdependence. Their legibility reveals a deep pride in her community and the land that sustains it; their fleetingness evinces her desire to protect them both. As Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and artist C. Ree have so powerfully written, “I care about you understanding, but I care more about concealing parts of myself from you…I am using my arm to determine the length of the gaze.”

An artistic practice never develops in isolation, but is entwined with and strengthened by the voices of many others. In recognition of this, while at the same time acknowledging that a community’s knowledge always exceeds that which can be encapsulated in written form, the artist and curatorial team, in partnership with Simon Fraser University, have assembled a library to accompany the exhibition. It is hoped that these books, which span subjects from Gwich’in language to poetry to feminist theory, might offer numerous different entry points into the work of Jeneen Frei Njootli, and create a space for study, reflection and discussion.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Emily Dundas Oke and Julia Lamare

Presenting Sponsor: The Audain Foundation

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, Nada Vuksic and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art towards the publication.


### Biography

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited her work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways and the bush. She works across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and is a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2017). In 2016 she was one of three recipients of the William & Meredith Saunderson, from the  Hnatyshyn Foundation. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017 and in 2018, she was shortlisted for the same. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Fierman Gallery, NYC; Artspace, Peterborough; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; and Definitely Superior Art Gallery, Thunder Bay. She has participated in the 2018 Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) / Contemporary Native Art Biennial, and in group exhibitions at Western Front, Vancouver; ONE AND J + 1, Seoul; Mercer Union, Toronto; Available Light Film Festival, Whitehorse; LandMarks2017/ Repères2017, PAVED Arts, Saskatoon; Whitewater Gallery, North Bay; Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba, Brandon; Vancouver Art Gallery, Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Yukon Arts Centre, Gallery 44, Toronto; and many others. Her work has been part of Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto (2018) and Vancouver (2017) as well as at the Adäka Cultural Festival in Whitehorse (2015). Frei Njootli has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and has collaborated with James Luna, Olivia Whetung, Tsēma Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart with Laura Ortman, Lyndsay Lachance, Dana Claxton, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill, and Chandra Melting Tallow. Her work is in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Jeneen Frei Njootli is currently a grateful, uninvited guest on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Skwxwu7mesh territories.



ProgramGuideSummer2018.pdf

BibliographyJeneenFreiNjootli.pdf

A close up view of a steel sheet marked with two hand prints pointing downwards and made of grease. The steel is covered with other faint markings and appears to be gray, blue and purple. 

Two large rectangular steel sheets lean against a wall of a gallery space. The sheets sit horizontally on the floor and are marked with grease prints. On the left sheet two handprints are visible. 

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One large rectangular steel sheet leans against a wall of a gallery space. The sheet is marked with grease prints. On the floor surrounding the sheet, a microphone, speaker, mixer and patch cords sit.

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An installation image of Jeneen Frei Njootli’s exhibition my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money. Three large scale steel sheets lean against two walls in a gallery space. 

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At the center of a gallery space, one large steel sheet leans against the back of a freestanding wall. A low ceiling darkens the space around the sheet and wall. 

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my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money is Jeneen Frei Njootli’s first monographic publication, produced in tandem with her solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery and features commissioned texts by renowned Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle, Vuntut Gwitchin spoken word poet Nagoohiindaak / Melissa Frost and celebrated Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize.

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